THE Government slammed into a roadblock yesterday as it tried to rush more benchmark Bills through the House, as part of term in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Extended Fund Facility agreement.

However, it wasn’t the threat of an Opposition boycott, that appeared on the horizon since last week, which stalled the process, but the fact that the Bills could not be approved on the legal-sized sheets on which they were printed, and had to be reduced to before they could be passed.

Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Peter Philips, who had just finished debating the new Securities (Amendment) Act 2013 with Opposition Leader Andrew Holness when he was informed of the requirement, suggested that the House needed to step up to the

21st century.

Leader of the House Phillip Paulwell agreed that the Standing Order ought to be amended to remove the page size requirement.

Speaker Michael Peart suspended the debate until copies of the Bill printed on the right sized paper could be acquired from the nearby printery.

In the meantime, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Roger Clarke was asked to open the debate on the Food and Nutrition Security Policy, on which he is collaborating with the Minister of Health, Dr Fenton Ferguson.

Some 20 minutes later, the right sized copies of the Securities Amendment bill arrived, and Dr Phillips was able to conclude the process. But the problem was not fully resolved. Forty five minutes later the debate on another Bill — the Companies (Amendment) Act — which was tabled earlier in the sitting and was scheduled to be debated and passed in the afternoon, was also stalled. Again, the issue was the legal size paper on which the Bill was printed, being in breach of the Standing Orders.

This time, however, Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce, Anthony Hylton, who was piloting the Bill, and Opposition spokesman, Karl Samuda, decided that instead of putting the House through another wait for the right sized copies of the bill from the printing office, that the closure of the debate should be put off until next week Tuesday. This was a delay the Government was hoping to avoid, as the Bill was programmed to be passed in the House of Representatives yesterday and in the Senate on Friday morning.

The Securities (Amendment), seeks to enhance the legal framework for the regulation of the securities industry, while the Companies (Amendment) Act seeks to improve the process of registering companies in Jamaica. Both are IMF benchmark Bills.